Psychedelics are a waste of life

Psychedelic enthusiasts are an irritation of modernity. People make wild claims about these substances. These claims are mostly demonstrably horse shit. I write this in the hopes that I’ll influence some young people to at least examine their choices. I don’t think psychedelics are the worst thing in the world, but they’re definitely not a good thing. I think their use is bad for  moral character, and I think it is trivially obvious that civilization has decayed since their use became popular and widespread.

My bona fides: I’ve used the things on and off from teenage years to my mid-30s, primarily for entertainment, but I also attempted various “man optimized” tricks with them that are presently popular. I’m a scientist, at least somewhat capable of reasoning and looking objectively at myself and others. I’m allergic to bullshit; even very popular bullshit -maybe especially popular bullshit. Psychedelic enthusiasm is popular bullshit.

I’m not even going to get deep into “psychological studies” because, as we all know by now, these are almost entirely bullshit: until recently they were saying you’d grow broccoli-like tumors on your noggin if you took the things. Now that enthusiasts who enjoy the things (instead of literal CIA mind control assassins and other government weirdoes) are involved in the “research” they’re being touted by irresponsible people as the next CBD oil panacea (and yes, CBD oil ought to be considered on all fours with snake oil unless you have some otherwise untreatable epilepsy or nausea). That’s the main reason I’m writing this: the enthusiasts are almost entirely unopposed at present. Not only are the enthusiast “researchers” unopposed, but people who are personal enthusiasts are generally unopposed and have unearned social status. I confuse the shit out of these people, because I have a fairly extensive history of use, but still maintain they’re about as personally useful as sniffing glue.

I’ll rely on a few statistics from the literature, but mostly I’m just going to rely on the humble tools of experience and rudimentary common sense. I won’t address their use in alleged treatment modalities for depression or whatever other than to vaguely doubt they’re any more effective than something like benadryl (which is apparently a pretty good anti-depressant, even if it does make your brain into swiss cheese taking it long term). I’d argue that the types of improvements in outlook measured as a positive outcome of psychedelic use would be similar for any novel, extreme and unfamiliar experience; most of which are less obviously bad for you. While you have Berkeley dipshits like Michael Pollan actively shilling for this nonsense, other Berkeley lumpy-head dipshits who are vastly more intellectually honest and scientific in their reasoning are at least raising doubts. It boggles me one need to credulously rely on “studies” -you just need to look around to know the irresponsible Pollans of the world are selling snake oil.

People who use the things on a regular basis think they bring back profound insights, because the drugs make looking at a flower feel profound. Yet, the actual insights brought back by people on their “trips” tend to be the type of thing a bit of self reflection would take care of, like “I’m mean to my family sometimes, and that’s kind of shitty.” I’ve yet to hear of any sort of improvement in creativity or even a single interesting idea anyone has ever brought back from psychedelics. Amphetamines have a vastly better track record of being useful stimulants for creativity; the last half of Paul Erdos career was fueled by benzedrine as have countless musicians, engineers and writers. There are many people who claim dropping acid made them more creative. But none of the people who make this claim are observably more creative than people who didn’t drop acid, and 99.9% of them are more mush-headed and self-regarding, which does seem to be a cognitive side effect of these drugs.

The feelings of profundity are another thing that irritates me. If trippin’ balls is the most profound thing that happened in your life, you lead a sheltered life. I’d put it at best on the same level as going on a roller coaster or committing a minor crime as a law abiding citizen.  I can think of any number of life experiences which were, for me, vastly more profound than tripping balls: sex, hunting in the forest (a primal altered state; every sense razor sharp), looking at nature through a microscope or telescope, old time religion, violence,  falling asleep, travel, newborn babies, heavy deadlifts, seduction, auto accidents, looking at the night sky, fighting, learning calculus and linear algebra, prolonged lack of sleep, love, dreams, even a really nice bottle of wine is more profound than muh trippin balls.  I mean, psychedelics are different from these experiences, they’re just not that amazing. I’m pretty sure (never tried; heard stories) taking a shitload of dramamine or robotussin is actually more amazing, and probably about as good for you.

The people who use aren’t good advertisements for their habits. While I know some who are heavy users, and some large fraction of my close friends are novelty seekers who have tried or used at one point or another, and everyone’s favorite burnout living in his cool apartment over mom’s garage is Joe Rogan, there are a lot of deserved stereotypes about people who use. Generally they’re more credulous about stupid things; astrology, weird nutrition, Q-anon, alien visitations, privilege theory, Russians under their bed, lost civilizations of ancient astronauts, magic crystals, whatever. I mean, that’s actually kind of cool: in principle you can talk to such people about anything. Except, perhaps, the idea that the church of psychedelics is worshipping a false god. The stereotypical “burn out” psychedelics user (who, admittedly, also probably smokes hella weed -which, if it needs to be said here, is also obviously bad for you) has all of the symptoms of pre-frontal lobe lesions; poor emotional regulation, apathy (drop out maaaaan), poor attention span and poor ability to concentrate and solve abstract problems, bad memory, poor impulse control. I’m not saying everyone that uses such drugs has brain damage, but a lot of users who identify with use of the stuff sure act like they do. On the upside, poor impulse control people are fun, and psychedelic users who are beyond hippy couch potato tier tend to do stuff which is more adventurous than most.

I suppose it may have been toxoplasmosis; no pictures of him with cats before LSD

Ernst Junger‘s novels got worse in literary quality after he dropped acid in 1948 too. Marmorklippen (1939) might have been his peak because of the foment in his life and his advancing age, or it might have been because he started punching holes in his brain later with his scientist friends. Can’t say, but I can definitively say that his literary style and creativity absolutely didn’t improve with use. Das Abenteuerliche Herz (1937) practically was psychedelic in its intensity (years before his use of psychedelics); he never wrote anything that visionary again.  Mind you, I think Eumeswil (1977) is a work of towering genius and I like much of his other postwar work as well, but his later work is complex, ponderous and doesn’t have the rays of artistic power that the earlier stuff does. Maybe the poetry is a young man’s flowering, and the old man is more of a thorn bush: but the point I’m trying to drive home here is acid absolutely didn’t nourish the flower -we must at least consider the possibility that it may have killed it.

In the US, rate of use is somewhere around 15-25% depending on the population segment and the survey. If there were some increase in creativity or insight or artistic or  improvement in technical/scientific change or personal awareness and social intelligence, this effect would be observable by now. We do not live in a time of great creative foment; the last 60 years since their introduction to Western Civilization have been vastly less creative than the previous 60 years. Very little to no great art, a dark age in architecture despite vastly more capabilities, chaos in interpersonal relations, even technology beyond improvements in lithography (a field noteworthy for lacking in dope fiends) has basically stalled for decades. On the other hand we do live in a time of widespread paranoia, credulity, political unrest, mass hysterias, mass mental illness, social decay, and declining standards of living. Pretty much exactly what you’d expect if a significant fraction of the population turned their brains into swiss cheese; just like your grandpa told you would happen. I’m not blaming psychedelics for the mess we’re in. I’m just inviting you to notice that things are at least not observably getting better despite widespread usage, and in fact are obviously getting worse, so the idea that psychedelics do something obviously and profoundly positive must be considered false when applied as a mean field theory.

The stuff is known to cause immediate personality changes after one use. Opinions obviously differ as to whether these changes are an improvement. This stuff was popularized by CIA mind control experiments after all. Do you think the spooks wanted people to be awesome independent minded supermen, or more mush headed and controllable? Think hard! Spooks are the ones who made it popular. Pretty sure cultures without psychedelics were more awesome than those where psychedelics have strong influence. Let’s take examples from architecture:

Wine and prayer

Peyote and howling at your spirit ancestors

 

Psychedelics are still used as models of schizophrenia and inducing schizotypical thinking in people. Again, schizotypicals who act like they have pre-frontal lesions can be fun at parties, but do you want to be that guy? Would you like to risk permanent  or at least persistent (for years) visual field disturbances? What about the people who experience complete psychotic breaks? We all know people who never came back in some sense from these substances, or who had severe mental illnesses afterwords. Enthusiasts will tell you some non-falsifiable happy horse shit about how they would have experienced psychotic breaks anyway, and the drugs just made it come out sooner.  This is incredibly stupid, and only the credulity induced by psychedelic use could make one take it seriously as an argument.  Sure, very few to no people actually die from taking such things, but losing your soul and becoming a shambling, muttering lump of flesh is arguably worse.

Microdosing is just as weaksauce. I tried it before it had a name, back when I was consumed with late undergraduate work. It was a terrible mistake. When you’re working to the limit of your mental abilities, such as trying to learn physics while working a full time job as a podunk redneck of dubious educational background, you notice when things are helping or hurting. Microdosing hurt, a lot. It is a nice stimulant; strong feelings of well being, and you don’t need morning coffee. It absolutely shreds your short term memory, and makes actual reasoning vastly more difficult. I tried lots of things to get an edge; at the time ginko and gotu kola were touted, and they might have had a mild effect which helped. Microdosing LSD definitely hurt; ridiculously obviously so. I was talked into it by a guy I knew who was gonna take a year off to microdose and learn topology. Rather than becoming Perleman or Grothendeik as he no doubt intended, he of course disappeared, literally never to be heard from again. I know people believe it helps them, but it’s entirely a subjective feeling; the science is pretty clear on this: no observable improvement on any axis. The risk/benefit ratio is vastly more obvious with speed and modafinil; both drugs help in the short term, but are ultimately probably rat poison. There is no microdosing version of Paul Erdos. The probability that you, as a special and unique snowflake, will be that microdosing Paul Erdos are basically nil. Not that you should want to be Paul Erdos; he was a genius, but he seemed to have a fairly miserable life.

Psychedelic use stinks of neoliberal suburban despair. It’s a shitty chemical induced bugman religion; a primitive and subjective one that produces no art, no beauty and no ideas of consequence. People get into this sort of thing because they’re bored, unimaginative and live in a shitty society; same as muh cummies sex degenerate people, except even more inward looking and pathetic. Widespread psychedelic use has brought no beauty or order to the world; it doesn’t make people better or more compassionate, it just makes them more compliant, subject to absolutely ridiculous conspiracy theories, and resigned to their fates as semi-lobotomized neoliberal bugmen. That said, if you still want to use such things, have at it. I don’t think you should be in jail (people who sell probably should be, and Michael Pollan ought to be flung into a volcano just on principle), but I reserve the right to make fun of you for being a credulous dipshit.

ps: even though I make fun of him for being a sperdo with a noggin even lumpier than mine,  this relevant SlateStar blog is pretty useful and good:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/09/is-there-a-case-for-skepticism-of-psychedelic-therapy/

 

Why quantum mechanics (and electrical engineering) uses complex numbers

I make no secret of being a John Horgan fanboy. I came to similar, somewhat less pessimistic conclusions to his “The End of Science” on my own without being aware of it (thanks to Bill Dreiss for pointing it out). Over time I become possibly even more pessimistic;  he seems to be correct in his bracing pessimism in almost all regards and might not be pessimistic enough. I can’t imagine trying to learn quantum mechanics in detail at his age, or even at my age, without the proper didactics or mathematical background. It is a heroic thing to attempt, even for a science journalist as good as he is. It bugs me, though, that nobody sat him down and explained complex numbers to him, and why they’re useful in quantum mechanics and other places. It also bothers me that Scott Aaronson can’t figure out why quantum mechanics uses complex numbers either; mostly because he’s supposed to be smarter than me, a mere toiler in the quantitative vineyards rather than a mighty academic and alleged quantum mechanic.

Jawline of a true hero

There are a lot of confusing things about quantum mechanics. Things which rise to the level of actual mysteries in some cases. The use of complex numbers is not among these things. Complex numbers are obviously not physical; I can’t win the square root of negative one quatloos in a gambling game. You can’t measure a complex number in a physical experiment; not in quantum mechanics or anyplace else. While the solutions to the Schroedinger equation written in its usual form are complex, it is the squared modulus of these solutions which are physical; and that’s not a complex number.

Complex numbers are, however, very useful as a mathematical tool. They’re used everywhere in physics and engineering where one must represent oscillatory phenomena or rotations; as far as my dumb ass can tell, that’s one of the main things they’re for. Nobody is confused in electrical engineering when they’re first trotted out as solutions to the differential equations involved in RLC circuits. Nobody is confused in E&M class when you use complex numbers to find solutions to the Maxwell equations. Nobody blinks an eye when they model the generators of the rotations of a solid body with (complex) Pauli Matrices using the Cayley-Klein parameters. Nobody freaks out when classical optics is festooned with complex numbers. Complex numbers are a great way of keeping track of things that have amplitude and phase; that’s why we use them.

Consider the Schroedinger equation:

That little is what gets people’s panties in a bunch. If the operator isn’t time dependent (aka the particle in the box or any of the other classical QM 101 examples), the time dependent piece falls out and you’re left with

where you can proceed to not worry about it, beyond the fact that the particle in the box has a frequency term which looks like . Oh muh gawrth, a complex number! Well, really bro, it’s just shorthand for -Euler taught us this, like 250 years ago. You know the solution to the Schroedinger equation has a time dependent piece with a frequency proportional to the energy and the quantum aka -that’s literally what quantum mechanics is: the realization that matter in potential wells has a time dependent frequency proportional to the quantum. We know it’s true, not because some wizard invented quantum mechanics, but because we observed this happening in the world of matter. You can write this in a different way without the complex number to keep track of the oscillatory term. Schroedinger’s early papers actually did write it without the complex numbers. Go and check for yourself in Schroedinger’s collected papers on Wave mechanics:

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.211600

It’s pretty interesting as a historical document as you can see Schroedinger putting his ideas together starting from the Hamilton-Jacobi equation. He starts talking about vibrations in terms of complex numbers in the third paper (page 41 Die Naturwissenschaften 1926) in a sort of ad-hoc way, more or less as I did above. He did similar calculations one paper earlier without using complex numbers; just sines and cosines; but as everyone in the universe who has ever worked with complex numbers knows: working with complex exponentials is a hell of a lot easier. It isn’t until page 103 in this book (Annalen der physik 4/81/1926) that he gets around to writing down something which is time dependent. Behold the real Schroedinger equation: still no complex numbers:

Since, as everyone knows, the kinetic energy term is a second order differential operator, you end up with a fourth order mixed partial differential equation here. Fourth order partial differential equations are ass to solve, and you can legit more or less just take the square root of each side and solve for and call it a day. That’s what Schroedinger did, and that’s why there are complex numbers in quantum mechanics. Go read it; it’s a beautifully reasoned piece of physics with zero mystification from the likes of Schroedinger. Anyone who tries to make this into something weird and mysterious, or who babbles on about quaternions or tessarines or octonions or whatever doesn’t understand differential equations applied to the material world, what complex numbers are, what physics is (this all comes from experiment, dipshits; the equations are just a model): they understand nothing.

Look at the big forehead on Herr Dr. Professor; physiognomy is real

Even more trivially, one could simply write down the ordinary Schroedinger equation as two equations; the real part and the complex part, then transform the solutions into functions of the real part: it’s what you’re actually doing when you solve the complex Schroedinger equation. You’ll end up with a cosine oscillatory thing with a phase. Pretty much everybody who has ever solved any differential equation which has solutions with wiggly bits knows this.

There are other non-complex-number-having formulations of quantum mechanics out there if Euler’s formula rustles your jimmies that hard. You can do Bohmian pilot waves pretty much starting from the Hamilton Jacobi equations of classical physics, ending up with the fourth order differential equations Schroedinger came up with, using a  “quantum potential” and then taking the square root. Or not taking the square root, if you’re study work hard 18 hours differential equations. There have been other non Schroedinger-respecter efforts to inadvertently or vertently de-complexify his equation. Ernst Madelung came up with an equivalent formulation of quantum mechanics based on hydrodynamics with no overt square root of negative ones apparent. Of course virtually nobody understands hydrodynamics (even more so than quantum mechanics if you can imagine that), and a glorified version of the diffusion equation is a lot easier to deal with, so it never really caught on. At the end of the solution, you’re still going to end up with a little wiggly term with a frequency proportional to the Energy divided by Because that’s how matter works. We know this, not because Schroedinger was a mighty Oz, all wise and powerful, with an equation from the mind of God, but from experiment. Which is pretty much the only way we ever learn anything in physics.

Again, quantum mechanics is plenty weird, but worrying about the complex numbers is moronic. It’s not just the two above who worry about it; it’s apparently a thing. People all over the place publish papers on this. Papers which presumably move them closer to tenure. There are forum questions all over, with answers that …. are decidedly a mixed bag of mostly right and absolute chowderheaded confusion. I can only wonder at how this confusion arose in the first place. Do people not study functions of a complex variable any more? Do people not solve differential equations using pencil and paper any more? Some of these mystifying dimwits are allegedly working physicists or quantum information theorists (whatever the fuck that is -presumably they warm a seat in a university somewhere). Have they not ever built, like, a simple RLC circuit for tuning in AM radio waves? What is going on here? There are plenty of mysteries in quantum mechanics: complex numbers are not mysteries of quantum mechanics. Making them somehow mystical rather than an ordinary use of centuries old mathematical tools is mush-headed nonsense and any jabroni who plays at this beyond the undergraduate bong-water level ought to be ashamed of themselves.

Woo for its own sake

Software development is a funny profession. It covers people who do stuff ranging from register twiddling in device drivers and OS guts, to people who serve web content, to “big data” statisticians, to devops infrastructure, to people who write javascript and html front ends on electron apps. To a certain extent, software engineering is grossly underpaid. If software engineers were allowed to capture more of the value they create, we’d have vastly fewer billionaires and more software engineers with normal upper middle class lifestyles, such as houses owned in the clear and successful reproductive lifecycles. The underpaid are often compensated in self esteem.

By “compensated in self esteem” I don’t mean they have high self esteem; I mean the manager saying “dude yer so fookin smart brah” kind. This is the same brainlet payment system in place in the present day “hard sciences” with people writing bullshit papers nobody cares about, or, like, journalists and other “twitter activists” who believe themselves to be intellectual workers rather than the snitches and witch hunters they actually are. Basically, nerd gets a pat on the head instead of a paycheck.

Once in a while, independent minded programmers demand more. They may or may not be “so fookin smart,” but they think they are. Their day jobs consist of unpleasant plumbing tasks, keeping various Rube Goldberg contraptions functioning and generally eating soylent and larva-burgers and claiming to like it. As such, most programmers long to do something fancy, like develop a web server based on Category Theory, or write a stack of really cool lisp macros for generating ad server callbacks, or add some weird new programming language of dubious utility to an already complex and fragile stack.

Allowing your unicycle-riding silver pants mentat to write the prototype in Haskell to keep him from getting a job at the Hedge Fund may make some HR sense. But if you’re going to rewrite the thing in Java so a bunch of offshore midwits can keep it running, maybe the “adulting” thing to do is just write it in Java in the first place.

I’m not shitting on Haskell in particular, though there is an argument to be made for looking askance at using it in production. Haskell is mostly a researchy/academicy language. I don’t know, but I strongly suspect its run of the mill libraries dealing with stuff like network and storage is weak and not fully debugged. Why do I suspect this? In part from casual observation, but also from sociology. Haskell is a fancy language with people doing fancy things in it. One of the valuable things about popular but boring languages is that the code has been traversed many times, and routine stuff you’re likely to use in production is probably well debugged. This isn’t always true, but it’s mostly true. The other benefit to boring languages is people concentrate on the problem, rather than the interesting complexities of the language itself.

You see it in smaller ways too; people who feel like every line of code has to be innovative: new elliptic curves, new network protocols, new block ciphers, new ZNP systems; to a crucial money oriented application that would have been really cool and have a much smaller attack surface if you had bestowed only one innovation on it. I guess this sort of thing is like bike-shedding or Yak-shaving, but it’s really something more perverse. If you have a job doing shit with computers, you are presumably solving real world problems which someone pays for. Maybe, you know, you should solve the problem instead of being a unicycle riding silver pants juggling chainsaws.

You see a lot of it in the cryptocurrency community, in part because there is enough money floating around, the lunatics are often running the asylum, in part for its undeserved reputation as being complicated (it’s just a shared database with rules and checksums; Bram more or less did the hard part in the summer of 2000 while my buddy Gerald was sleeping on his couch). For example: this atrocity by Gnosis. Gnosis is an interesting project which I hope is around for a long time. They’re doing a ton of very difficult things. Recently they decided to offer multi-token batch auctions. Why? I have no freaking idea. It’s about as necessary and in demand as riding to work in silver pants on a unicycle. Worse though: from an engineering perspective, it involves mixed integer programming, which is, as every sane person knows, NP-hard.

This is a danger in putting software developers or programmers in charge. These guys are often child-like in their enthusiasm for new and shiny things. Engineers are different: they’re trying to solve a problem. Engineers understand it’s OK to solve the problem with ephemeral, trashy, but fast-to-market solutions if the product manager is going to change it all next week. Engineers also plan for the future when the software is critical infrastructure that lives and fortunes may depend on. Engineers don’t build things that require mixed integer programming unless it’s absolutely necessary to solve a real world problem. If they juggle on unicycles, they do it on their own time; not at work.

Consider an engineering solution for critical infrastructure from a previous era; that of providing motive power for small fishing boats. Motors were vastly superior to sail for this task. In the early days of motorized fishing, in some cases until fairly recently, there was no radio to call for help if something goes wrong. You’re out there in the vastness on your own; possibly by yourself, with nothing but your wits and your vessel. There’s probably not much in the way of supply lines when you’re at shore either. So the motors of the early days were extremely reliable. Few, robust moving parts, simple two stroke semi diesel operation, runs on any fuel, requires no electricity to start; just an old fashioned vaporizing torch which runs on your fuel; in a pinch you could start a fire of log books. You glance at such a thing and you know it is designed for robust operation. Indeed the same engines have been used more or less continuously for decades; they only turn at 500 rpm, and drive the propeller directly rather than through a gearbox.

Such engines are useful enough they remain in use to this day; new ones of roughly this design are still sold by the Sabb company in Norway. They’re not as environmentally friendly or fuel efficient as modern ones (though close in the latter measure), but they’re definitely more reliable where it counts. When you look at this in the engine room, you are filled with confidence Mr. Scott will keep the warp drives running. If you find some jackass on a unicycle back there (who will probably try to stick a solar powered Sterling engine in the thing), maybe not so much.

I don’t think long term software engineering looks much different from this. Stuff you can trust looks like a giant one-piston semidiesel. You make it out of well known, well traversed and well tested parts. There are a couple of well regarded essays on the boringness yet awesomeness of golang. Despite abundant disagreement I think there is a lot to that. Nobody writes code in golang because of its extreme beauty or interesting abstractions. It is a boring garbage collected thing that looks like C for grownups, or Java not designed by 90s era object oriented nanotech fearing imbeciles. I think it bothers a lot of people that it’s not complicated enough. I’m not shilling for it, but I think anyone who overlooks it for network oriented coding because it’s boring or they think it’s “slow” because it doesn’t use functors or borrow checkers or whatever is a unicycle riding idiot though. Again looking at blockchain land; Geth (written in golang) has mostly been a rock, where the (Rust) Parity team struggles to maintain parity with feature roll outs and eventually exploded into multiple code bases the last time I checked. There’s zero perceptible performance difference between them.

There’s a Joel Spolsky on (Peter Seibel interview with) JWZ which I always related to on complexification of the software process:

One principle duct tape programmers understand well is that any kind of coding technique that’s even slightly complicated is going to doom your project. Duct tape programmers tend to avoid C++, templates, multiple inheritance, multithreading, COM, CORBA, and a host of other technologies that are all totally reasonable, when you think long and hard about them, but are, honestly, just a little bit too hard for the human brain.

Sure, there’s nothing officially wrong with trying to write multithreaded code in C++ on Windows using COM. But it’s prone to disastrous bugs, the kind of bugs that only happen under very specific timing scenarios, because our brains are not, honestly, good enough to write this kind of code. Mediocre programmers are, frankly, defensive about this, and they don’t want to admit that they’re not able to write this super-complicated code, so they let the bullies on their team plow away with some godforsaken template architecture in C++ because otherwise they’d have to admit that they just don’t feel smart enough to use what would otherwise be a perfectly good programming technique FOR SPOCK. Duct tape programmers don’t give a shit what you think about them. They stick to simple basic and easy to use tools and use the extra brainpower that these tools leave them to write more useful features for their customers.

I don’t think this captures the perverseness and destructiveness of people who try to get fancy for no reason, nor do I think JWZ was a “duct tape programmer” -he was an engineer, and that’s why his products actually shipped.

I say this as an aficionado of a couple of fancy and specialized languages I use on a regular basis. I know that it is possible to increase programmer productivity through language choice, and often times, runtime performance really doesn’t suffer. Languages like OCaML, APL and Lisp have demonstrated that small teams can deliver complex high performance software that works reliably. Delphi and Labview are other examples of high productivity languages; the former for its amazing IDE, and the latter for representing state machines as flow charts and providing useful modules for hardware. The problem is that large teams probably can’t deliver complex high performance software that works reliably using these tools. One also must pay a high price up front in learning to deal with them at all, depending on where you come from (not so much with Labview). From a hiring manager or engineer’s perspective, the choice to develop in a weird high productivity language is fraught. What happens if the thing crashes at 4 in the morning? Do you have enough spare people someone can be raised on the telephone to fix it? What if it’s something up the dependency tree written by an eccentric who is usually mountaineering in the Alps? For mission critical production code, the human machine that keeps it running can’t be ignored. If your mentat gets hit by a bus or joins the circus as a unicycle juggler and the code breaks in production you’re in deep sheeyit. The idea that it won’t ever break because muh technology is retarded and the towers of jelly that are modern OS/language/framework stacks are almost without exception going to break when you update things.

 

The “don’t get fancy” maxim applies in spades to something like data science. There are abundant reasons to just use Naive Bayes in production code for something like sentiment analysis. They’re easy to debug and they have a trivial semi-supervised mode using the EM algorithm if you’re short of data. For unsupervised clustering or decomposition it’s hard to beat geometric approaches like single-linkage/dbscan or PCA. For regression or classification models, linear regression is pretty good, or gradient boost/random forest/KNN. Most of the time, your real problem is shitty data, so using the most accurate  tool is completely useless.

Using the latest tool is even worse. 99 times out of 100, the latest woo in machine learning is not an actual improvement over existing techniques. 100% of the time it is touted as a great revolution because it beat some other technique … on a carefully curated data set. Such results are trumpeted by the researcher because …. WTF else do you expect them to do? They just spent a year or two developing a new technique; the professor is trying to get tenure or be a big kahuna, and the student is trying to get a job by being expert in the new technique. What are they going to tell you? That their new technique was kind of dumb and worthless?

I’ve fallen for this a number of times now; I will admit my sins. I fooled around a bit with t-SNE while I was at Ayasdi, and I could never get it to do anything sane. I just assumed I was a moron who couldn’t use this advanced piece of technology. No, actually, t-SNE is kind of bullshit; a glorified random number generator that once in a while randomly finds an interesting embedding. SAX looked cool because it embodied some ideas I had been fooling around with for almost a decade, but even the author admits it is horse shit. At this point when some new thing comes along, especially if people are talking about it in weeb-land forums, I pretty much ignore it, unless it is being touted to me by a person who has actually used it on a substantive problem with unambiguously excellent results. Matrix profiles looks like one of these; SAX dude dreamed it up, and like SAX, it appears to be an arbitrary collection of vaguely common sense things to do that’s pretty equivalent to any number of similar techniques dating back over the last 40 years.

There are innovations in data science tools. But most of them since boosting are pretty marginal in their returns, or only apply to corner cases you’re unlikely to encounter.  Some make it easier to see what’s going on, some find problems with statistical estimators, but mostly you’re going to get better payoff by getting better at the basics. Everyone is so in love with woo, the guy who can actually do a solid estimate of mean differences is going to provide a lot more value than the guy who knows about the latest PR release from UC Riverside.

Good old numerical linear algebra, which everyone roundly ignores, is a more interesting subject than machine learning in current year.  How many of you know about using CUR decompositions in your PCA calculations? Ever look at some sloppy PCA and wonder which rows/columns produced most of the variance? Well, that’s what a CUR decomposition is. Obviously looking at the top 3 most important of each isn’t going to be as accurate as looking at the regular PCA, but it sure can be helpful. Nuclear Norm and non-negative matrix factorizations all look like they do useful things. They don’t get shilled; just quietly used by engineering types who find them helpful.

I’m tooling up a small machine shop again, and it makes me wonder what shops for the creation of physical mechanisms would look like if this mindset were pervasive. The archetypical small shop has always had a lathe in it. Probably the first thing after you get tired of hacksawing up material; a bandsaw or powered hacksaw. Small endmill, rotary sharpener, and you’re off to the races; generally building up more tooling for whatever steam engines, clocks or automatons you feel like building. I’m imagining the archetypical unicycle-juggler buying a shop full of solid printers and weird CNC machines and forgetting to buy cutters, hacksaws, files and machinist squares. As if files and machinist squares are beneath them in current year.

Just as good alternatives to big-five theories of personality

It is a source of irritation to me that there exists ridiculously worthless and wrong psychological models in widespread use. Big five sends me into dangerous blood pressure levels. It’s preposterous and obviously only says something about the obsessions of the WIERD substrate it allegedly applies to, more than it says anything about the diversity of personality among human beings. When I say big-five is, worthless I don’t only mean it only applies to WIERD people, though that’s observably true; I mean it pertains to states of mind rather than permanent characteristics. It also is pretty worthless in predicting behavior, which is the only useful thing about psychometrics. I don’t care what people are feeling like when they take a test unless that maps directly onto long term behavioral patterns. Otherwise, it’s just checking in; “hey how you doin’ today?”

Five factor tests are essentially bags of words that respondents are asked to agree or disagree with. The assumption is that the bag of words form a basis set for describing human personalities. I have no doubts that they cluster very well under linear regression at least on WEIRD personalities. The problem is such models don’t have much explanatory power in explaining actual human psychological variance. 

Self testing, my results are all over the map. For example I took the thing and got this, this afternoon:

Addressing them one by one: for an extrovert, I surely do spend a lot of time by myself. I’m funny and do well at parties, but my natural set point is sitting on a mountain somewhere with a book. I’ll cop to “emotional stability” in that I’m fairly unflappable, though at various times in my life I was probably pretty neurotic. Locklin the disagreeable? Certainly I don’t suffer fools gladly. I’m also the dickhead who checks in on people to make sure they’re doing OK and who notices when they’re not; disagreeable people don’t do that. Conscientious; whatever -totally varies over time there are multiple 5 year periods of my life where I did nothing but chase women and drink heavily. I do usually pick things up off the floor, and go through vast map-reduce phases of gather/sort, though sometimes my desk looks like a junk pile.  Intellect/Imagination aka “Openness” -this one is most hilarious of all. It’s true, I revel in matters of the mind, I enjoy travel, art and I like messing with new ideas. While I’m fairly creative in my thinking, I’m also extremely traditional in my thinking: something that doesn’t compute with psychologists, who obviously don’t read much history or know who Ezra Pound or LeMaitre was. Or, for that matter Freeman Dyson or Heisenberg or Mendel or Celine or  Ernst Junger or Dali …. the list is endless -particularly among artistic and scientific giants. None of this is capable of predicting, say, who I voted for in the last election, or how likely I am to check in on the nice old lady upstairs. It’s just a bunch of shaggy dog stories and stereotypes about self regarding white college students in America in the mid to late 20th century.

another bad model mapped onto other cultures

I think pretty much anything is better than this; for example, the Hippocrates theory that men come in Phlegmatic, Choleric, Sanguine and Melancholic flavors is obviously better from a behavioral point of view, as they relate to how people behave. I don’t think those clusters map onto anything real, but I know people who exemplify all of these archetypes. Particularly people in Latin countries, more or less where the idea originated in ancient times.

There is also the Japanese blood type personality test. I only know a few Japanese people, and only well enough to know they take this idea seriously. I know that the English language wiki on the subject dismisses it as superstition, where the wiki link on big-five is treated with gaping credulity, and that seems to me, well, rather culturally insensitive. I’m willing to bet Japanese blood personality is more real and possibly more useful in Japan than big-five is in the US.

There are many things that matter which five-factor tests are completely blind to, for example: energy level. Some people vibrate with energy and enthusiasm. It has nothing to do with *any* of the five factors. It probably has something to do with thyroid activity and physical fitness. Dominance -some people dominate the room, and some have to be in charge otherwise they lose their shit; others go with the flow. Secretiveness; some people are not particularly forthcoming and you have no idea what they’re up to; they may even become anxious if you pry. They’re not necessarily up to anything shady, that’s just how some people are. Spooks love hiring such people. Curiosity: some people are curious about all kinds of things; other people really like sports or whatever fills up their hours.  Curious people tend to make better scientists, engineers, mechanics and detectives. Sociopathy; imagine you forgot to look for this in a life partner or cofounder -five factor doesn’t think it’s of any importance at all, because muh factors. Self reliance: some people don’t like getting help from others, other people seem to enjoy being dependent parasites. Character;  some people do as they say and say as they do. According to the five factor model, character has something to do with cleaning your room, or how likely you are to execute on a plan. Well, I’m here to tell you these are completely unrelated traits. There are deceptive, evil assholes who clean their rooms and can execute plans well, and people of the absolute highest character who live like slobs and are disorganized and lazy. Courage: some people don’t mind having grenades thrown at them all day; others wet the bed at the idea of walking around in the woods by themselves without a covid diaper on their face. Thrill seeking: some people may or may not be courageous, but seek sensory stimulation; others prefer a boring life and purchase lots of insurance. Beyond that: impulsivity is a trait many display, and others do not. You may be impulsive, a physical coward and thrill seeking: people like this exist -you meet them all the time. Five-factor will simply lump them all in with other unrelated populations of people such as one encounters on college campuses and in the clerical jobs they mostly matriculate to later. All of these are absolutely critical to people’s self conception and how they behave in the actual observable world. Modern psychology pretty much ignores them.

I think Cattell’s 16 factor test might measure more important things. However whenever I take the thing I always get a bullseye. Does this mean I have no personality, or does it mean it doesn’t measure my personality well? I think it might be a good start from a behavioral point of view, but it seems to be fairly unpopular among psychologist types. Cattell of course started out with training in the physical sciences, which is why he presumably thinks like me; wanting to make maps to observable behaviors.

Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory MMPI is an old spook developed thing more or less designed to ascertain how fucked up you are. I think it’s reasonably useful for filtering out WEIRD types who might be mentally ill, or, like, evil, and things like it should probably be more widely used. This despite the fact that, in America anyway, the prevalence of personality disorders is approaching 10%. Seems useful to me even if you can only catch half of them. Tolerance of crazy and evil people is one of the worst things about modernity.

Myers Briggs I do not consider a better model; it’s astrology tier. Nobody else seems to take it seriously either, except for the people who sell the tests, and the credulous people who pass them around because they’re fun. There are other crummy ones out there; one is called DISC, and it seems to be universally reviled by academic psychology researchers, despite it being invented by the creator of Wonder Woman. I don’t know why they hate it so much; doesn’t seem much worse than five factor -maybe oriented towards winnowing out people who might be good at sales, which, unlike five-factor, is at least an ambition to be useful to somebody. Also inventing Wonder Woman is pretty cool.

Psychology is mostly a profoundly silly basket of shaggy dog stories masquerading as a serious subject; it gets sillier by the decade. The five factor test is one of the tools the psychologists seem most proud of, but it’s really just a demonstration of how intellectually bankrupt they are. Anyone who has actually understood the linear regression tool knows you can have five “good” factors and understand absolutely nothing about how the universe works. After all, butter production in Bangladesh, US cheese production and sheep population in the US and Bangladesh is an absolutely superb three factor model for the S&P500 [Leinweber’s famous PDF]. Since these mere three factors explain 99% of the variance in the S&P500, isn’t this a better model than five-factor?

We laugh at the idea that sheep, cheese and butter predict the S&P500, then credulously accept the idea that psychologists have some how nailed it with the five factor model because “muh variance” on some arbitrary data set of a ridiculously censored population sample. It’s not that I don’t think studying human behavior is interesting; it is one of the most interesting subjects there is. It’s just that psychological researchers are a bunch of doofuses.